Each spring during the 1960s and 1970s, a quarter million farm
workers left Texas to travel across the nation, from the Midwest to
California, to harvest America's agricultural products. During this
migration of people, labor, and ideas, Tejanos established
settlements in nearly all the places they traveled to for work,
influencing concepts of Mexican Americanism in Texas, California,
Wisconsin, Michigan, and elsewhere. In
The Tejano Diaspora,
Marc Simon Rodriguez examines how Chicano political and social
movements developed at both ends of the migratory labor network
that flowed between Crystal City, Texas, and Wisconsin during this
period.
Rodriguez argues that translocal Mexican American activism gained
ground as young people, activists, and politicians united across
the migrant stream. Crystal City, well known as a flash point of
1960s-era Mexican Americanism, was a classic migrant sending
community, with over 80 percent of the population migrating each
year in pursuit of farm work. Wisconsin, which had a long tradition
of progressive labor politics, provided a testing ground for
activism and ideas for young movement leaders. By providing a view
of the Chicano movement beyond the Southwest, Rodriguez reveals an
emergent ethnic identity, discovers an overlooked youth movement,
and interrogates the meanings of American citizenship.